"Pat Cadigan - Death in the Promised Land" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cadigan Pat)

She repeated the sequence once more, and then again in slo-mo, watching the blood disappear right along with the creature, leaving Shantih Love behind i Konstantin called up the record of the kid's vitals and found that, as she had expected, they had quit registering at the moment the blood had disappeared.
Konstantin took her finger off the pause button and let the action go forward.

On the screen, the Shantih Love character sat up, its elegant fingers feeling the ragged edges and flaps of skin where its throat had been cut, mild annoyance deepening the few lines in its face. As Konstantin watched it trying to pinch the edges of skin together, she was aware that she was now thinking of the kid's AR persona as a thing rather than a human.

Presumed "it" until proven human? Konstantin frowned. So what was driving it now, anyway-a robot, or a very human hijacker?
She could watch video for the next three hours and see if anything would become clearer to her; instead, she decided to talk to people she was reasonably sure were human before taking in any more adventures of a dead kid's false pretending to be alive in a city pretending to be dead.

If the office had seemed cramped before, Miles Mank made it look even smaller by taking up at least half of it. When it became obvious that he actually knew next to nothing, Konstantin tried to get rid of him quickly, but he kept finding conversational hooks that would get her attention and then lead her along to some meaningless and boring point, at which he wouldn't so much conclude as change the subject and do it all over again. She was finally able to convince him that he was desperately needed at the parking lot to help sort out the clientele with her bewildered partner. Then she prayed that Taliaferro wouldn't use a similar excuse to send him back to her. She still didn't like his eyes.

The first of the other two employees was a silver-haired kid named Tim Mezzer, who was about the same age as the murder victim. He had the vaguely puzzled, preoccupied look of ex-addicts who had detoxed recently by having their blood cleansed. Officially, it was a fast way out of an expensive jones. In fact, it made the high better on relapse.
"How long have you worked here?" Konstantin asked him.
"Three days." He sounded bored.
"And what do you do?" she prodded when he didn't say anything more.
"Oh, I'm a specialist," he said, even more bored. "I specialize in picking up everybody's smelly 'suit when they're done and get 'em cleaned. " Mezzer put a plump elbow on the desk and leaned forward. "Tell the truth-you'd kill to have a job like that instead of the boring shit you do. "
Konstantin wasn't sure he was really being sarcastic. "Sometimes. Did you know the victim?"
"Dunno. What was his name?"
" Shantih Love."
Mezzer grunted. "Good label. Must have cost him to come up with one that good. Sounds a little like an expensive female whore-assassin, but still pretty good. Someday I'll be rich enough to be able to afford a tailor-made label. "

Konstantin was only half-listening while she prodded the archiver for the victim's reference file. "Ali, here we are. Real name is-" she stopped. "Well, that can't be right."
"Don't be so sure." Mezzer yawned. "What's it say?"
"Tomoyuki Iguchi," Konstantin said slowly, as if she had to sound out each syllable.
"Ha. Sounds like he was working on turning Japanese in a serious way."
"Why?"
"Well, for post-Apocalyptic Tokyo, of course." Mezzer sighed. "What else?"
"There's a post-Apocalyptic Tokyo now?" Konstantin asked suspiciously.
"Not yet." Mezzer's sigh became a yawn. "Coming soon. Supposed to be the next big hot spot. They say it's gonna make the Sitty look like Sunday in Nebraska, with these parts you can access only if you're Japanese, or a convincing simulation. It's the one everybody's been waiting for."

Konstantin wondered if he knew that something very like it had already come and gone a good many years before either of them had been born. "How about you?" she asked him. "Is it the one you've been waiting for?"
"I don't know from Japanese. I'm an Ellay boy. Got all those gorgeous celebs you can beat up in street gangs. But the bubble-up on this is, there's some kinda secret coming-attraction subroutines for post-Apocalyptic Tokyo buried in the Noo Yawk, Hong Kong, and Ellay scenes and no non-Japanese can crack them. If they're really there. Shantih Love musta thought they were."

"But why would he take two fake names?" Konstantin wondered, more to herself.
"Told you-he was trying to turn Japanese. He wanted anyone who stripped his label to find his Japanese name underneath and take him for that. Invite him into the special Japan area." Mezzer put his head back as if he were going to bay at the moon and yawned once again. "Or he was getting that crazy-head. You know, where you start thinking it's real in there and fake out here, or you can't tell the difference. You need to talk to Body. Body'll know. Body's probably the only one who'd know for sure.
"What body?"
"Body Sativa. Body knows more about the top ten ARs than anyone else, real or not."
Konstantin felt her mouth twitch. "Don't you mean Cannabis Sativa?" she asked sarcastically.
Mezzer blinked at her in surprise. "Get off. Cannibal's her mother. She's good, but Body's the real Big Dipper." He smiled. "Pretty win, actually, that somebody like you'd know about Cannibal Sativa. Were you goin' in to talk to her?"

Konstantin didn't know what to say.
"Go see Body, I swear she's the one you want. I'll give you some icons you can use in there. Real insider icons, not what they junk you up with in the help files. "
"Thanks," Konstantin said doubtfully. "But I think I fell down about a mile back. If he was turning Japanese, as you put it, why would he call himself Shantih Love?"
Mezzer blinked. "Well, because he was tryin' to be a Japanese guy named Shantih Love. " He frowned at her. "You just don't ever go in AR, do you?"

"Can't add to that," said the other employee cheerfully. She was an older woman named Howard Ruth with natural salt-and-pepper hair and lines in a soft face untouched by chemicals or surgery. Konstantin found her comforting to look at. "Body Sativa's the best tip you're gonna get. You'll go through that whole bunch in the lot down the street and you won't hear anything more helpful." She sat back, crossing her left ankle over her right knee.
"Body Sativa wouldn't happen to be in that group, by any chance?"
Howard Ruth shrugged. "Doubt it. This is just another reception site on an AR network. Considering the sophisticated moves Body makes, she's most likely on from some singleton station, and that could be anywhere. "
"Come on," said Konstantin irritably, "even I know everyone online has an origin code."
Howard Ruth's smile was sunny. "You haven't played any games lately, have you?"
Konstantin was thinking the woman should talk to her ex. "Online? No."